Godmother Series

[P'ter]

Eann: When reading about Felicity's Irish base, I keep picturing Dragonhold. Was this intentional?

[eann]

Why, yes, P'ter, it was! However, there is nothing in Anne's actual attic but her furnace room, a lot of books, a couple of beds and a loo.

[P'ter]

But does she have a yew avenue leading to a scrying pool?

[Hans]

How about a pergola leading to a (now filled in) small double-circle pond?

[P'ter]

That'll do nicely.

[Hans]

I feel obliged to mention here that, while Anne adored her little double circle pond it never became what she wanted. It was filled in and is now the Hugh and Kevin McCaffrey Memorial Rose Garden in honour of her older and younger brother. The last time I looked the roses were doing great.

This part of the (back) garden is Anne's view from her working room, with the Wicklow hills and the peak of Carrickfergus in the background.

here's a picture:



this is how it was:

[P'ter]

Certainly suitable for sneaking a peek at Faerie.

[eann]

I was there for the three years right after the house was built and the ponds weren't there yet so I had to imagine the scrying pool and pergola--the yew hedge came from another site in Ireland we visited while I was there. Yews have it all over The Eggplant That Ate Chicago for getting huge and pushy but they seem to accept carving nicely. I have one in my front yard that had to get cat's ears cut into its foliage to make room for the powerlines and let me see around it to pull out of the driveway.

[Hans]

Ah, but when you were there the swimming pool was still working, right?

[eann]

Yes, and I used it too. Annie soooo needed a California pool dude for that thing--the problem was that nobody really knew how to put one in properly (as discovered in subsequent excavations) or how to maintain it afterward. But it was sure nice while it worked.

[Lanen]

Howdy there eann! Good to see you, and happy new year to you. How's things in WA? We're just getting our first thaw since mid-December, and even though I love ice and snow, even I am a little grateful...

[eann]

I am looking nervously around and whispering "no snow here yet." I have some driving out of town and state I want to do soon and I would like clear roads, thanks! I've been hearing about your snow from the British cat owners on my UnitedCats.com list. The general concensus is that it is cold and wet.

[Lanen]

~Oddly enough, they're about right. At the moment, however, what it mostly is is gone. Nice to see the ground again, I must admit.

[Hans]

Originally Posted by Lanen

~Oddly enough, they're about right. At the moment, however, what it mostly is is gone. Nice to see the ground again, I must admit.

Oh YES! Despite last monday being blue monday I smiled when I saw the muck was gone!

[eann]

(still whispering) It's raining but actually rather warm.

[eann]

Just so everyone knows, The Godmother is now available as a book on demand and as an ebook for Kindle and assorted other e-book readers. So is Song of Sorcery and Scarborough Fair. They're working on Healer's War now.

[Lanen]

eann, that's fabulous news! Is this new, or has it been the case for a while? Another writer friend of mine has some books whose rights have reverted to her at last, I know she's curious about how you do that! Wonderful to hear it, where do we go to purchase?!

[eann]

They're on Amazon now and I suppose probably Barnes and Noble too. Tell your friend I was advised to go to e-reads.com. Richard Curtis and John Douglas are the movers and shakers there.

[Lanen]

Thanks so much eann - will go retrieve!

[eann]

Actually, Elizabeth, if you have the digital files of your books, you can turn them into ebooks easily enough yourself--pdfs to sell via PayPal from your own website or to reformat as Kindle and/or any of the others. I understand that it's necessary to get an ISBN number to sell through the larger venues and that here anyway, you can get 10 numbers for about $250. My problem is I don't HAVE digital files of the final drafts of many of the books and the expense comes from having them coverted. Besides which, my final draft on disk is not the copyedited one. You do have to remove all formatting the publisher has done and dig up your own publicity quotes and so forth because all that stuff belongs to the publisher, even if the book belongs to you.

[eann]

Oh, and for print on demand books you can always use Lulu.com or something. It would mean you'd have to buy enough for signings if you wanted to do that. The alternative is having a bunch privately printed but that's expensive and builds up an inventory.

[edith]

Originally Posted by eann

Actually, Elizabeth, if you have the digital files of your books, you can turn them into ebooks easily enough yourself--pdfs to sell via PayPal from your own website or to reformat as Kindle and/or any of the others. I understand that it's necessary to get an ISBN number to sell through the larger venues and that here anyway, you can get 10 numbers for about $250. My problem is I don't HAVE digital files of the final drafts of many of the books and the expense comes from having them coverted. Besides which, my final draft on disk is not the copyedited one. You do have to remove all formatting the publisher has done and dig up your own publicity quotes and so forth because all that stuff belongs to the publisher, even if the book belongs to you.

Do you have Word files or anything? It's really easy to convert a Word file to PDF if you have the right program and I know that there are free and web-based programs available. If not, you can scan images of a word-processed or typed file although that can be very time consuming (I've had to do that with academic papers in the library). It shouldn't be too hard to do yourself, if a little boring.

It takes me about 2 minutes to convert a word document of say 20 pages and about 20 minutes to do the same by scanning documents (It helps that stuff here is scanned directly to PDF) and then trimming them afterwards (I'm not very good at keeping things straight).

I can look some stuff up for you if you like. I looked once before, before I moved here because I needed a PDF and my old uni wasn't as organised as they are here.

[GinnyStar]

Originally Posted by eann

Just so everyone knows, The Godmother is now available as a book on demand and as an ebook for Kindle and assorted other e-book readers. So is Song of Sorcery and Scarborough Fair. They're working on Healer's War now.

I think I've read Healer's War I think
Good I might just see what I can find.

[eann]

No, Edith, I don't have Word files for everything, just the latest books, and even those aren't the copyedited versions. I've really only been using Word and Windows, as has Anne, by the way, since our first Petaybee book together. She imported a friend of a friend who was a good teacher and a Windows whiz to teach us both how to use the program and Windows in general. Before that I'd used WordPerfect and an old program on my original Apple 2+ called Xardax. The first 8 books or so I wrote were in that program or typed on a--gasp--typewriter. I am so paranoid about keeping copies of everything I do that I have dozens of badly labeled disks in various formats for each book and most of them are out in a storage shed, probably corrupted beyond hope, because just before all this e-book stuff came up I couldn't imagine why I'd ever need them again.

[Hans]

Originally Posted by eann

Actually, Elizabeth, if you have the digital files of your books, you can turn them into ebooks easily enough yourself--pdfs to sell via PayPal from your own website or to reformat as Kindle and/or any of the others. I understand that it's necessary to get an ISBN number to sell through the larger venues and that here anyway, you can get 10 numbers for about $250. My problem is I don't HAVE digital files of the final drafts of many of the books and the expense comes from having them coverted. Besides which, my final draft on disk is not the copyedited one. You do have to remove all formatting the publisher has done and dig up your own publicity quotes and so forth because all that stuff belongs to the publisher, even if the book belongs to you.

A - It's rather easy to scan printed text using OCR (I've done so in the past)

B - ten ISBN for $250 is a rip off. I'm an acknowledged publisher and have only to pay about $10 administration fee. That'll be a Dutch ISBN, mind but that doesn't matter. For instance, the "40 Years of Pern" book was published by me and has a Dutch ISBN.
It was published using the online print-on-demand option with Lulu and was even available with Amazon.com for a time (Lulu did that).

C - technically I could easily publish books for Elizabeth but the trouble lies more with who has the rights to do so and the consequences of publishing legally.

Eann, for your old WP files there's a solution, I could transcribe/rework them but your oldest 8 books, you would need to sacrifice a copy so the pages could go through a sheetfeeder scanner for OCR scanning. Turning the pages and keeping a book securely down on the scanner glass a couple of hunderd times is NO fun! I know. It's how I made my first highly illegal digital copies of Pwern books And NO, I never distributed them, they were for my research only. And by the time I had done1.5 books I discovered they were to be had online as pirated versions if you knew where to look...
And before you ask: Anne knows and said that I own so many copies of her books (many titles in many variations AND languages) I was entitled to the odd illegal digital copy

[GinnyStar]

Sounds like that scanning jobs in All the Weyrs of Pern.

Also I've don't a version of that with A surprising note how well it turn out, she ask me did I type or scan the questions, missed one question for a assignment. I also know the feeling on scanning something with a spine to make a copy of to share irking.

[eann]

Thanks for the input, Hans. I haven't looked into ISBN prices myself, that's just what a friend told me. What I was thinking I'd do is buy a sheet feeding scanner myself--Fujitsu makes one that they say will handle the job (there's a pre-sale tech support you can call and I did). Like you say, doing it on a flat scanner is just too grim to contemplate but with a double-sided sheet feeder it ought to go fairly quickly. I do have copies I can sacrifice for that purpose too.
I imagine Anne figured by the time you'd flat scanned those books, you'd earned them anyway!

[eann]

Ebook update! I got my first royalty check for three of the books I had made into e-books--made back almost 3/4ths of what I spent to produce one of them as an e-book and Healer's War is not yet out on Kindle. I was a little surprised to see that Kindle actually sold less than an outfit called Fictionwise that I suppose must do other formats. Anyway, for those of you who were wondering if authors ever earn royalties back on those, apparently so. It said I was getting 50% which is a lot more than the nothing I get from a used book! The collabs with Anne are made into e-books (at least the recent ones) by Del Rey and I presume by Harper Collins as well. They bought electronic rights along with the others.

[Hans]

Good news, Eann. That fictionwise and some of their colleague sites sell more ebooks than Amazon doesn't surprise me at all. The non Kindle formats have been along for quite a while before the Kindle appeared on stage.

I suppose Microsoft eReader and PDF are the best sold but haven't searched for the truth on this. Remember that PDA's and computers (both desktops and notebooks) have been available far longer than dedicated ebook readers and I for one find the idea of a dedicated ebook reader (many of which can only handle one format) a bit silly...

The good news is that if you have your text avaiulable digital you can make the book into any format you like.

[eann]

The outfit I'm dealing with sees to it that the books are made available in all of the formats.

[Hans]

Oh, that is very good!

[eann]

I wonder if Fictionwise will sell books to people in countries where they're not otherwise available?

[Hans]

Hmm, our member bingley recently had a spot of trouble with that using Barnes & Noble owned ebook sites. Will have to look which site didn't make trouble for him (being in Indonesia).

Checked this thread: http://forums.srellim.org/showthread.php?t=7628

And yes, Fictionwise and ereader are Barnes & Noble owned and wuldn;t sell to him.
He was succesful though using http://www.ebooks.com/

Hope this helps you a little, Eann.
Not 100% what the criteria are. But being the author maybe you can influences this?

[eann]

All I can influence, Hans, is if I create my own digital files and sell pdfs from my website--then I can sell to whomever I choose and I will definitely choose to sell to people in other countries who want to read my books. They just have to be able to read them in English. I shudder to think what the Google translation program would do to them!

[Hans]

Ah, OK. I thought you could maybe also have some say in the way they are sold when on sites like fictionwise.com. So your ebook contract also go through your official publishers, right? You don't set the contracts for digital rights/ebooks yourself or just through your agent?
Do I understand you right that, for older books probably, there are no digital rights contracted by the publisher and therefor you could sell PDF copies through your own website?

Don't even think about translation programns. You are right to shudder. But I'm telling you no news

[eann]

You know, the original publisher doesn't still have control over the ebooks that just got published--I'm not sure what the policy is of the outfit I did business with but I sort of doubt there are restrictions on where they are sold.

[AnnMarie]

Eann...I am LOVING Grandmother Webster!

[eann]

Thanks, AnnMarie. I thought she was a lot of fun and Spiderwoman has always been one of my favorite holy people.

[AnnMarie]

Took me two days to read. Still not sure I am all that crazy about Ray, but he does seem to be making a serious attempt. LOVE the way so many recognized Grandmother for who she was, and didn't bat an eyelash!

[eann]

Among both Navajo and Hopi people, she is one of their ancestors so yeah, it's our magical grandma, listen up and keep a civil tongue in your head if you want to continue life as you know it!